CCT460: Assignment #2 – Website Assigned: July 31st Due: August 20th – 9AM
Introduction: We've worked through some basic walkthroughs to help you familiarize yourself with content type creation, views, blocks and image handling in drupal. In overengineering our CV pages, you've learned skills that could be applied to producing more complex publishing workflows. In working with the NineSixty theme you've learned the basics of manipulating a theme – that is, understanding how content regions managed through the CMS tie back to CSS stylesheets (as well as how every theme has shortcomings and idiosyncrasies). So, now that you have rudimentary drupal design literacy, we're going to spend the remainder of the course working up your personal sites – customizing them so that they fit your needs.
Assignment: Working with a theme of your choosing start filling out your site beyond the CV page. Depending on your studies and interests this could result in very different needs but you might consider adding some combination of: a blog, a portfolio with a template for individual project pages, an archive for your academic writing, photo galleries, or other functionalities (there is a world of modules out there right?). Beyond content, you might choose to focus on exploring interface and various jQuery tools and—no matter what—you will also have to determine what is an appropriate landing page for your content and the type of impression you want to make. Alternatively you might want to step away from a personal site and develop a site for a business, organization or hypothetical client – this assignment is open ended and it is up to you to decide your goals.
Don't feel compelled to take on and implement dozen of features, try to take the time to do a few things very well. This is not only an exercise in design, but planning.
Evaluation: This assignment is worth 50% of your mark. Students will primarily be evaluated on:
How cohesive their final site is in regards to type, readability, organization.
Variance and sophistication in the landing page vs. sub pages vs. individual nodes.
How far they have progressed from the CV exercise (note you can get rid of the CV page if you like).
Cross browser compatibility will also be considered – your page should perform equally well in the most recent versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari (or students are expected to be aware of inconsistent performance and mention it on submitting their work).
Ambition and ingenuity will also be taken into consideration
You are now charged with building on the framework you've constructed. Please note the below rubric that breaks down how marks will be allocated/rewarded:
Participation Mark – Wiki Progress Report: Don't forget that 7% of the term mark is awarded for your wiki participation. You are expected to create either a tutorial or document some troubleshooting related to your work for the benefit of the class. See the participation rubric page for further details.
Design statement: Each student will have to submit a short text outlining their design philosophy (500 words max), identifying where they had issues, identifying cross-browser compatibility issues and outlining their future plans for their site (if they have any). Additionally, all students are required to note which theme they are using within this email. This is to be submitted electronically as a .docx or .rtf via email by 9AM on August 20th – you are not complete the assignment until you have sent this email along.
You will be provided with instructions as to how to download and backup site at the end of the semeser. This means you can take your site, port it into a hosting environment of choosing and keep developing this site as your personal web presence. Remember this, this project belongs to you – please approach/tackle it accordingly.
Example work: The following projects all received 80% or higher in past versions of this course...
Assigned: July 31st
Due: August 20th – 9AM
Introduction: We've worked through some basic walkthroughs to help you familiarize yourself with content type creation, views, blocks and image handling in drupal. In overengineering our CV pages, you've learned skills that could be applied to producing more complex publishing workflows. In working with the NineSixty theme you've learned the basics of manipulating a theme – that is, understanding how content regions managed through the CMS tie back to CSS stylesheets (as well as how every theme has shortcomings and idiosyncrasies). So, now that you have rudimentary drupal design literacy, we're going to spend the remainder of the course working up your personal sites – customizing them so that they fit your needs.
Assignment: Working with a theme of your choosing start filling out your site beyond the CV page. Depending on your studies and interests this could result in very different needs but you might consider adding some combination of: a blog, a portfolio with a template for individual project pages, an archive for your academic writing, photo galleries, or other functionalities (there is a world of modules out there right?). Beyond content, you might choose to focus on exploring interface and various jQuery tools and—no matter what—you will also have to determine what is an appropriate landing page for your content and the type of impression you want to make. Alternatively you might want to step away from a personal site and develop a site for a business, organization or hypothetical client – this assignment is open ended and it is up to you to decide your goals.
Don't feel compelled to take on and implement dozen of features, try to take the time to do a few things very well. This is not only an exercise in design, but planning.
Evaluation: This assignment is worth 50% of your mark. Students will primarily be evaluated on:
You are now charged with building on the framework you've constructed. Please note the below rubric that breaks down how marks will be allocated/rewarded:
Participation Mark – Wiki Progress Report: Don't forget that 7% of the term mark is awarded for your wiki participation. You are expected to create either a tutorial or document some troubleshooting related to your work for the benefit of the class. See the participation rubric page for further details.
Design statement: Each student will have to submit a short text outlining their design philosophy (500 words max), identifying where they had issues, identifying cross-browser compatibility issues and outlining their future plans for their site (if they have any). Additionally, all students are required to note which theme they are using within this email. This is to be submitted electronically as a .docx or .rtf via email by 9AM on August 20th – you are not complete the assignment until you have sent this email along.
You will be provided with instructions as to how to download and backup site at the end of the semeser. This means you can take your site, port it into a hosting environment of choosing and keep developing this site as your personal web presence. Remember this, this project belongs to you – please approach/tackle it accordingly.
Example work: The following projects all received 80% or higher in past versions of this course...